George Miller originally planned an anime spinoff for Mad Max: Fury Road

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George Miller has been kicking around ideas for his Mad Max sequel Fury Road for more than a decade, but it seems the original plan was much more ambitious.

In addition to the new film starring Tom Hardy as Max and Charlize Theron as Furiosa on a wild chase across the apocalyptic desert, Miller had also conceived two other scripts that would constitute a new trilogy of films. But now he’s offered up some new details on the original plan in an interview with The Playlist.

As we’d gleaned before, Miller was eyeing a separate project that would have focused on the character of Furiosa, brought to life by Theron in Fury Road. But, instead of a sequel, it sounds like Miller had originally wanted to do the Mad Max: Furiosa project in conjunction with Fury Road. But not as a live-action movie -- it was apparently going to be an anime:

"[The dream that originated Fury Road] wasn't a conflation of two stories. We were going to do [‘Furiosa’ as] an anime before it was delayed a second time when we were rained out of Australia. But because we were delayed that didn't happen, and so we've got that script, and we've got another one…

It's more Furiosa's story and how she came about. Even though it's a chase, to really make the film as authentic as possible we wrote backstories to every vehicle, to every character. We knew Nic Hoult's character Nux from the moment he was conceived, we knew who his parents were, how he became a War Boy."

So, yeah, if Fury Road turns out to be a hit, Miller already has two more scripts ready to roll. There’s just one minor problem, though: Theron has previously voiced some reticence to return for another Mad Max film, citing some behind-the-scenes chaos and the grueling type of shoot required to nail down that hellish apocalypse look. So, yeah, maybe they'll swing back to the anime idea?